Biennale of Sydney offers sensory overload

Nicola Harvey

Posted: Wednesday, 27 June 2012 at 10:48am

The 18th Biennale of Sydney opens to the public today. With over 100 artists exhibiting more than 220 artworks the bi annual exhibition is an extraordinary logistical exercise for the artists and guest artistic directors Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster.

Belgian Ann Veronica Janssens is one of the many artists who arrived in Sydney intending to create a new artwork in response to the old industrial buildings on Cockatoo Island – one of Biennale’s five venues.

Since 1973, the Biennale of Sydney has enthralled Sydneysiders. The organisers are well versed in dealing with the pressures of opening week. But an exhibition of this size does not always come together without hiccups and false starts.

On Cockatoo Island, two days out from the official opening, the creation of Ann Veronica’s mist-generating art work stalled. The mist might have been considered a poetic, haunting visual response to the tiny island in the middle of Sydney Harbour which has been home to, in turn, a colonial-era prison, a reformatory, and two dry shipping docks, but it was obstructing the other artworks.

Undeterred Ann Veronica temporarily abandoned the installation and moved on to her second venue Carriageworks, where she is showing a series of sculptures and a site specific installation playing with light and colour.

“Maybe I’ll make a new work tomorrow,” Ann Veronica told me when we met at Carriageworks earlier this week.

“My work is mainly about experimentation, but I’m very precise and if it’s not in a good context the work will not be good.”

Ann Veronica is admired internationally for creating artworks that shroud the audience in mist, fog or projected coloured light. Her immersive installations reduce visibility in a space offering visitors a private moment to experience the artwork with heightened senses.

In the cavernous foyer of Carriageworks – once a railway workshop – Ann Veronica has arranged six glass vitrines containing transparent oil. She describes the work as a simple response to the history of painting and sculpture. In one, a pink square seems to float on the surface, but it’s a trick of light. It is the base of the vitrine that is coloured. Ann Veronica revels in such visual trickery. The laws of the natural world and physics are her tools for creating chemically slick, reconfigured objects that are part abstract painting, part immersive sculpture.

- Nicola Harvey

Find out moreAnn Veronica Janssens’ artwork will be on show at Carriageworks and Cockatoo Island until 16 September 2012.

The 18th Biennale of Sydney runs from 27 June until 16 September 2012 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Cockatoo Island, Carriageworks and Pier 2/3 in Walsh Bay.